POWAQQATSI
A film review by David N. Butterworth
Copyright 1996 David N. Butterworth/The Summer Pennsylvanian
Directed by Godfrey Reggio Rating: *** (Maltin scale)
Culture shock can best be described as confusion and uncertainty affecting people exposed to an alien culture without adequate preparation. Much the same can be said of POWAQQATSI, the new film by activist filmmaker Godfrey Reggio, which certainly takes a different perspective in the way it manipulates sound and images. But if you stay with it, and become acclimatized to its unique and personal point of view, the experience proves ultimately rewarding.
A companion piece to Reggio's first feature KOYANNISQATSI (and reportedly the second in a trilogy of films embracing various ways of life on our planet), POWAQQATSI bears resemblance to that film only in its non-narrative style. There is no dialogue, no narration, little sound aside from a richly textured and hypnotic Philip Glass score, which accompanies the films visuals with a wall-to-wall intensity. Whereas KOYANNISQATSI contrasted natural and man-made vistas, POWAQQATSI is a more socially conscious piece, concentrating on human achievement in a variety of forms--labor, craftsmanship, artistic creativity, religious worship--each demonstrated by those in such Third World communities as India, South America, Africa, and parts of Asia.
The film opens with a veritable army of workers hauling cloth sacks full of dirt up the side of a mountain. Very little in this film happens in "real time." The film has been slowed down to such an extent that not only do we see the ropes cutting into the men's skin, but we can almost feel their pain. Eventually we see the body of a fallen miner being carried aloft, and realize that there is a price to be paid for such industry.
But the film is less an evocation of the routine hardships these people face than it is a celebration of the human spirit, and it soon becomes clear that this film's major strength is its humanity. We are confronted by people at work, occasionally at play, dutifully going about their daily business with conviction. The characters here are bigger and brighter than those you'll see in any "conventional" film. A scene early in the film depicts a row of Latin American children, curious, camera conscious, each one decidedly different than the next. Of course we are all different, but we share the same human burdens. We all toil, we all have to work hard in order to make a living, irrespective of class or culture or social status. And the film succeeds in contrasting these cultures by exposing the beauty inherent in the rigors of the everyday.
On a superficial level, the film could be seen as nothing more than a travelogue for workaholics. The images often seem arbitrary, lacking continuity. But it is difficult to dismiss them, however stylized or pretty may they appear. A young girl beating a donkey fervently with a stick, a boy and a great white mare frolicking in the surf, another girl transfixed as the camera focuses on a wall of graffiti behind her, ghosts of cars passing the burned out shell of another, a goods train which goes on for miles and miles--all are hard to forget.
One cannot, however, divorce the visual material, impressive as it is, from the music. It is as if they are one; inseparable. Philip Glass's work has matured significantly since his last collaboration with Reggio, yet it still bears his inimitable trademark. It is not as atonal or minimalistic as his score for KOYANNISQATSI . Instead, it borrows heavily from the music and rhythms of the cultures and sub-cultures represented. Highly percussive in nature, Glass uses native as well as traditional instruments, accented by an Hispanic children's choir.
But man's endurance comes through in the end, how he overcomes sometimes major obstacles in order to further his own creations, extend life, maybe even cheat death. For this is the meaning of POWAQQATSI--an entity, a spirit which consumes life in order to further its own. Not a spirit in the traditional sense, but a life force equal to those of nature, of light and dark, land and sea, sound and image.
-- David N. Butterworth
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